Refrigerator appliances generally include a housing that defines one or more chilled chambers for receipt of food items for storage. One or more doors are provided for selectively accessing the chilled food storage chambers. Certain doors are rotatably hinged to the cabinet or another component of the refrigerator appliance, such as an inner door of a door having a door-in-door configuration.
Certain conventional refrigerator appliances include a hinge assembly to rotatably couple the door with the housing. Such hinge assemblies can include a cam riser that raises or lowers the door as the door rotates through its swing arc in order to facilitate either opening or closing of the door. Such cam risers typically have two or more opposing cam surfaces projecting along the vertical direction in line with a hinge axis of the hinge assembly. For applications where vertical space is limited, such as e.g., a refrigerator appliance having a refrigerator door with a nested or door-in-door configuration, such vertically oriented cam risers present design challenges. For instance, due to the vertically oriented design of such conventional cam risers, additional vertical space is typically required to rotatably couple the doors of the door-in-door configuration to the cabinet. The additional vertical space can be unsightly, can increase the amount of materials needed for constructing the refrigerator appliance, and can be impractical for smaller appliances designed for tight or limited spaces, such as e.g., a compact refrigerator appliance.
Accordingly, an improved door hinge assembly that addresses one or more of the above challenges would be useful.